The Value of a Single Trip

Cities in the English-speaking new world aren't often compared favourably against European cities, at least from a design and transportation perspective. Car dependence, sprawl, and inefficient land-use are all big issues in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The contrast between these countries and Europe is what got me interested in urbanism and transportation in the first place.

I think there is at least one aspect of Anglo-urbanism that doesn't get enough appreciation though: central-business districts (CBDs).

For the purposes of this post, I'm defining a CBD as an area where non-industrial employment is densely concentrated around public transit. CBDs can exist without transit, but even in the US, that's pretty rare. Today, the biggest CBDs are mostly in Asia, but the concept of a dense business district clustered around a rail station really took off in the English-speaking New World (the USA, Canada, Australia, etc.) over the 19th and 20th centuries. As a result, many, but not all, big cities in the Anglo-world have done a great job of concentrating jobs near transit hubs, in a way that I think is often underappreciated. Ironically, I think they're especially misunderstood in the English-speaking urban planning discourse, which often draws heavily from European examples without always seeing the full picture.

Monocentric CBDs in the Anglo-American tradition

Think of cities like New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Sydney. All have dense business districts concentrated around their central rail station(s).

Polycentric CBDs in the European tradition

Now think of European cities like Paris, Madrid, and Amsterdam - cities that have business districts somewhat like a North American "downtown". The big rail stations in these cities are hubs for activity, but they're not always near these dense employment centres. If you need to get from a major rail station to a job at Paris's La Défense, Madrid's AZCA, or Amsterdam's Zuidas, there's a good chance you'll have an extra trip in front of you.

There are many caveats here, and I'm not aiming to draw like-for-like comparisons:

• All cities have different histories and geographies.

• Many European cities have multiple rail stations, making it tough to concentrate jobs around just one.

• European cities also tend to have better regional transit systems that free commuters from dependence on a single station. These often involve regional trains that run through city centres, allowing for more places to be connected.

• Many cities in the English-speaking world have little or no good public transit and many that do, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have done a poor job of concentrated jobs around the transit they have.

• Many European cities have deliberately created business districts outside of their centres to preserve historic neighbourhoods and make use of cheaper land. These are worthy goals.

Proximity to major transit nodes matters

Even with these caveats in mind, I think it's worth drawing attention to the way cities locate, or don't locate, jobs around major transit nodes. No matter how good a city's local or regional transit is, major rail stations are usually the easiest places to get to for the largest number of people. When jobs are further away from these, it becomes harder for many people to access economic opportunity. Every added step in a journey adds time and complexity. Add too much complexity and people will either avoid making that trip or be forced to orient their lives around it.

Let's compare the "CBD commuter" experience in Toronto and in Paris.

About 600,000 jobs, 40% of Toronto's total, are concentrated downtown near its main railway station. All regional and intercity rail lines feed into this station, so a commuter can live along any line and have direct access to a large number of potential jobs with a single trip. Toronto isn't a particularly transit-oriented city, but a lot of people can and do commute by transit because so many jobs are concentrated around its downtown rail station.

Meanwhile, about 200,000 jobs, 10% of Paris's total, are concentrated in La Défense, a large business district northwest of Paris proper - most jobs are spread out across the city's inner core. La Défense is located directly on RER Lines A and E which serve large portions of the Paris metro-area, but it's fair to say that a great deal of commuters to Paris's biggest single employment cluster will face a multi-leg journey. Unlike Toronto, Paris is extremely transit-oriented, but more of its transit commuters will have more complex journeys because employment isn't as concentrated in one place.

Paris has far better public transit than Toronto. Its RER, metro, and trams are more extensive, more frequent, more reliable, and faster than Toronto's by a wide margin. But Toronto's dense CBD means that even with lousy public transit, taking the subway or train to work is sensible for a lot of people.

Excellent transit doesn’t eliminate last-mile friction

I became interested in these different city structures and commute patterns because I've experienced them firsthand. In New York and Toronto, I got to be part of a daily surge of people commuting into their respective cores. Conversely, I've also commuted across Switzerland for multiple jobs, between Basel, Zürich, and Bern, and have experienced several European-style Outer Business Districts (OBDs?), similar to what I see in Paris, Madrid, and Amsterdam.

As I talk about in other posts, Switzerland has an outstanding public transport system but, in its cities, a substantial portion of jobs are located away from the main rail stations. In Zürich, many jobs are in Oerlikon and Hardbrücke. In Basel, many are in major pharmaceutical campuses on the French border. In Bern, many are in the Wyler area northeast of town. And so, while a train trip between all of these cities comes in at around 55 minutes, an end-to-end commute is often at least 1 hour and 30 minutes simply because of the distance between the rail stations and jobs.

Nowhere has all the answers

My point here isn't to argue that Anglo cities are better than continental European ones, but rather to appreciate a specific aspect of them. Old-fashioned CBDs like those found in denser American, Canadian, and Australian cities allow lots of people to easily access jobs in a single trip. European cities do many things well, and I personally prefer them for their mix of centre-city activities, improved public transit, and better cycling. Nevertheless, in a profession that spends a lot of time trying to unlearn Anglo-American habits, I think it's worth appreciating that, at least in this one way, North American and Australian cities are pretty elegant. Moreover, as transit becomes more expensive to build in almost every western country, we might look more to them as examples of how to put more jobs, and housing, around the transit we already have.